Provenance:

The Artist.

Robert Miller Gallery, New York.

Charles Clarkson, Florida.

Private Collection, New York.

Exhibited:

Coral Gables, Florida, Virginia Miller Gallery, Alice Neel: Works on Paper: 1926-1977, February 12 - March 4, 1978.

New York, Robert Miller Gallery, Alice Neel: The Last Years, September 8 - October 14, 2000.

Literature:

Charles Humboldt, "Trial by Stoolpigeon," Masses and Mainstream, Vol. 2, Issue 12, 1949, p. 68, illustrated.

Patricia Hills, Alice Neel, New York, 1983, p. 87, illustrated.

Marilyn Schmitt, "Alice Neel: Works on Paper: 1926-1977," Arts Magazine, vol. 52, no. 9, May 1978, p. 23.

Pamela Allara, Pictures of People: Alice Neel's American Portrait Gallery, Hanover, 1998, p. 100, fig. 51, illustrated.

Phoebe Hoban, Alice Neel, The Art of Not Sitting Pretty, New York, 2010, p. 178.

Alice Neel: Anarchic Humanist

In 1949, Judge Harold Medina, a Federal Judge in the Southern District of New York, presided over a notorious nine-month case: Eugene Dennis, the head of the U.S. Communist Party (CPUSA) and 10 other Party leaders, were, under the Smith Act, accused of conspiring to advocate the violent overthrow of the United States government. In October, 1949, they were each sentenced to five years in jail and fined $10,000, a decision which the Supreme Court upheld in June, 1951. The infamous, often raucous trial, conducted at the peak of the McCarthy Era, was widely covered by the press. Emblematic of the Second Red Scare, (1947-1957), its dramatic courtroom spectacle—and its emphatic anti-Communist message—turned Judge Medina into a national hero.

On assignment to cover the trial for the monthly Marxist magazine Masses & Mainstream, Alice Neel--who first joined the Communist Party in 1935--indelibly captured this historic American moment in several images, including two studies and a striking grisaille, “Judge Medina-Trial Scene.” Among those depicted was the virulently anti-Communist witness, Angela Calomaris, whom Neel scathingly referred to as the “stool pigeon.”

As Neel told Patricia Hills, “Twelve were tried at the Smith Act trial. It wasn’t for doing anything. It was just for thought. The head of the party, Eugene Dennis, was given five years, and he went in with brown hair and came out with white hair. Alexander Trachtenberg, the man who brought all the Communist literature to this country, had five years in jail too. A lot of them were convicted. Medina was the judge. During the Depression, Medina owned a lot of slum houses. When they evicted the poor people and put their effects on the sidewalk, the Communists would carry them back in. So Medina just hated communists…. I did this wonderful drawing of Angela Calomaris, who gave anti-Communist lectures on the radio….Medina treated her with kid gloves… She looked just like a man, an Italian man with a little feather in her hat. The drawing is a marvelous satire. The drawing I did of Medina was reproduced in Masses and Mainstream in 1949.”

Neel’s drawing of Judge Medina is an even better “marvelous satire” than her individual drawing of Calomaris, who is singled out, along of course, with Medina, in her group illustration, “Judge Medina-Trial Scene.”

As the New York Times obituary of Judge Harold Medina, who died in March, 1990, at age 102, put it, “The trial was marked by disruption, confusion and unendurable delay as five defense attorneys scolded Judge Medina, shouted at him, shook their fingers at him, mocked him and generally ignored accepted courtroom decorum. Throughout the trial, the judge patiently rocked back and forth in a huge, thronelike red leather chair. ‘You scratched your head and pulled your ear,’ Harry Sacher, one of the defense lawyers, argued at one point, trying to prove the gesture was intended to “negate” a defense argument. ‘You’ve called me corrupt and everything else you could think up,’ Judge Medina replied. I want you gentlemen to understand that when I scratch my head I’m just plain scratching my head.’”

Neel’s spare but incisive caricature of Judge Medina in her grisaille rendering of the trial captures him in just such a gesture. Neel has slyly imbued him with four(!) busy hands, not merely scratching his head, but fully expressing his frustration and dismay at the behavior of the lawyers (later convicted of contempt of court,) which is also clearly telegraphed by his deeply furrowed brow. In her study of the Judge for the trial scene, the only drawing ultimately published in Masses & Mainstream, the Judge has the normal two hands, clasping his face in apparent disbelief. His oddly curled right thumb, cradling his chin, presages a signature Neel trope: her depiction of hands with distinctively bent digits.

Neel’s friend and fellow-traveler Charles Keller was also working for Masses & Mainstream, and did two drawings of the trial, which appeared in the April 1949 edition. But only Neel’s study of Judge Medina was published in the December issue, accompanying Charles Humboldt’s review of George Marion’s book on the infamous trial, The Communist Trial, An American Crossroads. As “marvelously satirical” as it was, the study drawing of the “stool pigeon,” Calomaris herself, was not published. Nor was the more detailed, larger, grisaille illustration, “Judge Medina-Trial Scene” featuring the Judge, his star witness, Calomaris, the court stenographer and two lawyers, (strongly resembling Richard Nixon and Roy Cohn.)

(Neel’s sleight of hand—not to mention her radical politics-are apparent in the deft insertion of what seem to be images of the two noted anti-Communists, Richard Nixon and Roy Cohn, in the foreground of the Trial Scene. Neither Nixon nor Cohn were at the Medina trial. But in the summer of 1948, Nixon was determined to expose Alger Hiss for perjury during his espionage trial, and to prove that Hiss was lying about his part in a Communist spy ring. Based on recently unearthed evidence—the so-called Pumpkin Papers--that Nixon provided to the court, Hiss was ultimately indicted. For his part, Cohn, who joined the U.S. Attorney’s office in 1947, where he began his career by prosecuting Communist party leaders, would later gain renown as Senator Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel and right hand man during the 1950s hearings, serving as a prosecutor at the Ethel and Rosenberg trial in 1951, resulting in their going to the electric chair two years later.)

Neel’s caricatures of Judge Medina evoke Ben Shahn’s drawings of another famous trial, “Sacco & Vanzetti,” particularly the image, “The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti,” (1931-32), which depicts the Judge in the case. And, even more explicitly, Jack Levine’s painting “The Trial,” (1953-54) which did not depict a specific trial, although Levine later acknowledged that the figure of the judge was based on Judge Harold Medina.

Around the same time, Neel illustrated several of her close friend Phillip Bonosky’s short stories, “The Wishing Well,” also published in Masses & Mainstream, on April 21, 1949, as well as a “Walk to the Moon,” published in the Daily News. Both illustrations, in addition to the illustrations to his story, “A Bird in her Hair,” and “A Quiet Summer’s Day,” (1948) were reproduced in Bonosky’s short story collection, “A Bird in her Hair,” (dedicated to Neel) in 1987, with Neel’s drawing on the cover and as a frontispiece. Neel’s depiction of the title character, a fierce-looking woman whose tangled mop of hair is tragicomically crowned by a perching bird, is somewhat similar in style to her Angela Calomaris caricature. (However the subject couldn’t be more different: an impoverished young woman taunted by village locals.)

Bonosky was a lifelong, dedicated Communist who would later, at Neel’s behest, help organize a show of her work in the Soviet Union in 1981, just three years before her death. In the movie, Alice Neel: Collector of Souls, by Nancy Baer, she says on camera: "I joined the Party several times. But you know what? I'm not a bureaucrat, by nature. I hate bureaucrats. You know what I am, I'm an anarchic humanist."

Neel’s Party affiliation, (to this day there is a poster of Lenin on the wall of her apartment on West 107th Street,) as well as her devotion to the genre known as Social Realism--popular in the WPA years but widely debunked by the early 1940s--would earn her a thick FBI file, and relegate her to the margins of the art world for at least several decades. Neel gained early success in the 1930s for such powerful works as her portraits of poet Kenneth Fearing (1935), (who included a character based on her in his classic noir novel “The Big Clock,” later a movie,) and waterfront organizer Pat Whalen. Other overtly political works of the time include “Nazi’s Murder Jews,” “Uneeda Biscuit Strike,” “Investigation into Poverty of the Russell Sage Foundation,” and a lesser-known work, “The Magistrate’s Court,” (which might be seen as something of a forbear to the Judge Medina caricature,) all done in 1936.

But, despite her awareness of Abstract Expressionism, which completely dominated the post-World War II art world, Neel remained faithful to her enduring engagement with social activism. “I just went my own way,” she later said. As she told Barbaralee Diamonstein, “All during the 40s and 50s, New York was nothing but Abstract Expressionism and nobody painted people or anything like that….but during that time I couldn’t give up what I was interested in for what was in fashion…so I kept right on painting.”

As Marilyn Schmitt wrote in a review in ARTS Magazine of “Alice Neel: Works on Paper: 1926-1977,” a retrospective which ran at Miami’s Virginia Miller gallery from February 12 to March 4, 1978, and included the caricature of Judge Medina: “There is nothing domesticated about Alice Neel. From the beginning of her career in the 1920s, she has stood outside, and sometimes outrageously beyond—convention, and pursued her freedom with a relentless determination in her art, in her politics and most of all her life.”

Notes:

1) Notorious nine-month case….: New York Times, March 16, 1990 “Harold Medina, U.S. Judge, Dies at 102,”. The Washington Post, “Harold R. Medina, 102, Dies,” March 17, 1990.

2) On assignment to cover the trial for Masses & Mainstream, Pamela Allara, Pictures of People, New Hampshire, Brandeis University Press, University Press of New England, 1998, p. 99.

 3) As Neel told Patricia Hills: Patricia Hills, Alice Neel, New York: Harold R. Abrams, Inc., 1983, pp. 86, 87.

 4) As the New York Times obituary…. The New York Times, March 16, 1990.

 5) While Keller’s two drawings…Allara, Pictures of People, p. 99 (in noting when Alice’s drawing was published, Allara mistakenly referenced the headline of Charle’s Humboldts’ book review instead of the correct title of George Marion’s book.)

 6) And, even more explicitly,” Artists on the Left, Andrew Hemingway, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002, p. 256.

 7) Around the same time, Neel illustrated her close friend Philip Bonosky’s short story: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty, Phoebe Hoban, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010, p. 201. Illustrations described appear in: Phillip Bonosky, A Bird in Her Hair and Other Stories, New York: International Publishers Company, 1987; cover and frontispiece of “A Bird in Her Hair”; illustration for “A Quiet Summer’s Day,” p. 138.

 8) “I joined the Party several times..I’m an anarchic humanist.”: Hoban, ibid, p. 118.

 9) “I just went my own way…”: Hoban, ibid., p. 176

10) As Marilyn Schmitt wrote in a review: Hoban, ibid, 316. Marilyn Schmitt, “Alice Neel,” Arts magazine, Vol. 52, No. 9, May 1978, p. 9

-Phoebe Hoban

Framed: 20 3/4 x 17 3/4 x 1 in.

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